ANALYSIS

In soaring tones, President Barack Obama on Tuesday set out a revamped climate agenda for his second term, seeking to breathe new life into priorities that have been slipping from his control since his early years in the Oval Office.

“The question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it's too late,” said Obama, who assembled a long menu of initiatives, large and small, that he can carry out without the support of Congress.

Mopping his brow in the capital's sweltering heat, he declared: “I am here to say we need to act.”

But in many ways, the details Obama offered only illuminated the constraints that have hobbled him since Republicans took control of the House in 2011 and began blocking climate initiatives.

The biggest step he is now offering – clamping down on what he called “the limitless dumping of carbon” into the atmosphere from electric power plants – is actually a promise the administration has broken before. Those very regulations are overdue under court-approved deadlines in a 2010 legal settlement.

On another hotly contested question – whether to build the Keystone XL pipeline to deliver heavy tar-sands oil from Canada – he left himself some wiggle room even as he said that the climate change implications would be at the heart of his decision, when it comes.

Approving Keystone would require “a finding that doing so would be in our nation's interest,” he said, in his most notable discussion of the issue to date. That would come “only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the problem of carbon pollution,” he added. Answering that question – about the pipeline's net impact on the climate – is at the heart of the dispute between environmentalists who say its emissions are profoundly significant and a draft State Department analysis that declared them to be inconsequential.

Advocates for climate action were quick to rally to Obama's side, taking encouragement from his Keystone remarks and saying that his broad array of proposals included significant steps forward.

UNYIELDING GOP OPPOSITION

But many also spoke of the limits on what he can do without Congress, where Republican opposition has been unyielding.

Among the critical questions is how quickly the administration will move forward with the rules on power plant emissions, which account for 40 percent of the nation's carbon dioxide pollution and a third of its greenhouse gases. Every year of delay makes it less likely that the administration can meet its pledge to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by the year 2020.

“It is important to note that this action is not voluntary,” said the Center for Energy and Climate solutions in a detailed fact sheet describing the forthcoming power plant regulations, and describing the legal settlement that demanded them.

“According to the Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA (a decision that was recently reaffirmed), EPA is legally required to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act just as it has addressed more traditional pollutants for the past 43 years,” the center explained. The White House said Obama will order the EPA to propose a new version of the first set of its power plant rules – for newly built plants – in September. Meanwhile, the EPA will move “expeditiously” through the complex process of negotiating and drafting regulations for plants that already exist.

NEW POWER PLANTS

It remains unclear whether the proposal for new power plants will be as tough as one issued last year, which was supposed to have been made final by now. The industry had objected to provisions that held coal plants to the same performance levels as those that burn gas, which is cleaner.

If the two sets of rules can survive the inevitable challenges in Congress and the courts, their effects on atmospheric carbon won't begin to be felt until shortly before 2020, four years after Obama has left office.

Complicating the matter is the Senate's refusal to vote on Obama's nominee to head the EPA, Gina McCarthy. She is currently in charge of air regulations there, and may be held hostage to the negotiations on the rules, which will cost the industry billions of dollars.

The Edison Electric Institute, which represents utility companies, released a statement saying it is ready to work with the administration

Defenders of the coal industry were less circumspect.

“Declaring a war on coal is tantamount to declaring a war on jobs,” Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said on the Senate floor on Tuesday.

In his speech, Obama said he would gladly work with anyone to devise a more comprehensive approach to confronting climate change, “but this is a problem that does not pause for partisan gridlock.”

Bill Barron, a Utah campaigner with the Clean Climate Campaign, sighed when asked whether Obama was doing enough, given the political realities. Barron once mounted a quixotic race as an independent against Sen. Orrin Hatch, a conservative Republican, winning less than one percent of the vote.

“I would like for him to be more aggressive about it,” he said. “I can only appreciate how difficult it is politically. But with so much hinging on this issue, I wish he would do more.”

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